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Alexandra Claudia Manta

My intellectual formation could be easily regarded as eclectic: I started as a student of literary and cultural studies , then I moved into the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies, and now I am finally operating at the intersection of literary studies, history of early modern philosophy, and cultural history of Enlightenment medical knowledges and practices.

My current dissertation project is provisionally titled “Embodying Sensibility/ Irritability within 18th-Century Vitalist Physiology and Philosophical-Erotic Fiction. Vital Feeling(s) and Feeling “Human”during the French Enlightenment.” It constitutes a transdisciplinary inquiry into the conceptual and methodological transfers, influences, or affinities between a particular subset of Enlightenment medical theorizing (namely medical vitalism, with a focus on Montpellier vitalist physiology) and a particular kind of literature (French philosophical-erotic novels, or 'anthropologies of Enlightened European human nature,' as I prefer to refer to them).

I see myself as a junior researcher in the Long Eighteenth-Century (1650-1850) in Europe, and my work as well as related expertise can translate into a variety of undergraduate courses in different areas, in function of departmental and degree needs and specific requirements: undergraduate introductory courses in the European Enlightenment, elective courses in the French Enlightenment, introductory courses in the History of Science and Medicine (from Antiquity to the 19th-century), electives in French & British Literature, introductions to European Historiography and to the Historiography of Science.